posted at 2:40 pm on June 13, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

Don Lemon at CNN gets his turn with a media stick to take some shots at Alvin “Piñata” Greene, the South Carolina Democrat who miraculously won the US Senate primary despite never making a public appearance. Actually, it’s beginning to look like Greene won because he never made a public appearance. Keith Olbermann conducted a professional and straightforward interview that utterly dismantled Greene, but Lemon begins to get concerned that Greene’s having some sort of mental breakdown and spends the last minute of the clip attempting to provide therapy:

Lemon says in the clip that the New York Times called him a Republican plant, but that’s not actually true. The Times reported yesterday on the many, many oddities in South Carolina politics over the past decade, including the accusation by others that Greene was a plant. The paper reported the day before on allegations from Rep. James Clyburn that someone planted Greene. Gail Collins wrote that the debacle was likely the result of mental coin-flipping by uninformed voters, and that “South Carolina the best place in the world to be a political reporter.” However, no one at the NYT has written categorically that Greene was a plant at all, let alone a Republican plant.

But back to the trainwreck that is Alvin Greene. When Lemon tells Greene that some SC Democrats are calling him a few fries short of a Happy Meal, Greene demands to know their names, as if that makes some sort of difference. When Lemon tells him who they are (they’re on record), Greene mumbles an I’m-rubber-you’re-glue response that is more pathetic than the accusation. He still can’t give more than monotone answers of few syllables to most questions Lemon or anyone else asks, although he has managed to replace “no comment” with “my lawyers are handling that,” which in politics is not exactly an improvement. Greene sounds so morose that it’s no wonder that Lemon starts getting concerned at the end of the call.

The biggest loser in this debacle, however, is Vic Rawls, Greene’s primary opponent. How did a former judge and a Democratic Party leader lose to Greene — by over thirty thousand votes?